Facebook has rolled out a new feature for its Indian users and its related to a noble cause like Blood donation. Facebook India plans to make blood donation easy by connecting the donor and the recipient easily. There is quite a shortage of safe blood in India and there aren’t a huge number of people donating in the first place. More often than not the recipient’s family is the one responsible for arranging the blood in a situation of distress. To make things easier for people Facebook India has decided to introduce its new feature where a person in urgent need of blood can find donors nearby.
Facebook says to make its new feature possible in India it has done quite some research and been in touch with non-profit organizations, hospitals and even with individuals who have previously found blood donors successfully.
Details of Facebook’s new feature that encourages blood donation in India:
Users in India will require to make changes to their profiles so as to sign up as blood donors to use in order to use Facebook’s new feature . They need to provide information like blood group, the last time they donated, etc on the sign-up page. This information will be set to ‘only me’ by default but one can choose to make it public. When someone requires blood they will have to generate a post using Facebook India’s new feature that will notify the donors available nearby. The donor then can contact the recipient via Messenger or Whatsapp. The contact information of the donor will not be shared with the recipient until they do that themselves.
Facebook plans to introduce the new feature on the 1st of October that is the National Blood Donors Day in India.
The mind behind Facebook’s new blood donation feature: Hema Budaraju
The idea was conceptualized by an Indian employee Hema Budaraju who inspired Facebook to roll out its new blood donation feature.
In a status update Mark Zuckerberg the CEO of Facebook revealed that the new feature was developed as Hema Budaraju has had her own personal experience when she tried to search for a donor for her father who was diagnosed with cancer. He lost so much blood during chemotherapy that he had to take a transfusion for a week
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